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AN 



ORATION, 



MATERIAL GROWTH AND TERRITORIAL PROGRESS 



UNITED STATES, 



DELIVERED AT 



SPRINGFIELD, MASS. 



FOURTH OF JULY, 1839. 



Bv CALEB GUSHING, 



Pnbltshcil by request of tlio Committee of Arrangements. 



SPRINGFIELD : 

FRINTEP BV MERE! AM, WOOD AND CO. 
1839. 






Al OA^ aAiTLu^ In ; 



ORATION. 



We have reached, in tlie progress of time^ another Anniver- 
sary of the Independence of the United States. That gracious 
Providence, which led our forefathers hither in the pursuit of 
civil and religious liberty for them and their children ; which 
watched over them in the first feeble beginnings of their politi- 
cal existence ; which nurtured and fostered their infant com- 
monwealths into the bone and gristle of manhood ; which nerved 
their souls for the issue when the dread struggle for separate 
nationality came on ; which in that crisis of their fate gave 
patriotism to their councils and victory to their arms, and which 
guided their noble efforts to lay the foundations of the great 
fabric of constitutional freedom we inherit from them, — that 
good Providence has continued to smile upon our country, and 
permitted us at this day to be the witnesses and the partakers 
of its grandeur and prosperity. 

Thanks be to God, then, above and before all, — to Him, the 
author and the finisher of so good a work, — thanks be to Al- 
mighty God, — thanks from a thousand altars and from millions 
of grateful hearts, be sent up to Heaven this day, for the 
unequalled blessings vouchsafed to our fathers and to us ! 

And our highest and first duty of cheerful acknowledgment 
and thanksgiving to God discharged, it becomes us that we 
next do fitting honor to those pure and wise men, the agents of 
His will in the colonization, establishment, growth and stability of 
these United States. To govern, it has been said, a society of 
freemen, by a constitution, founded on the eternal rules of right 
reason, and directed to promote the happiness of the people and 
of every individual, is one of the highest prerogatives which can 
belong to humanity. But is it not more glorious still, to origi- 
nate, to invent, to found, to establish into all future time, such a 
constitution of government ? Surely, insomuch as the creator is 
above the thing created. Men, in general, are the fruit of the 
subsisting facts, amid which they find themselves to be born and 
bred. In general, it is the chief task of the good and patriotic of 
each successive generation, to preserve, promote, extend and improve 
the social institutions transmitted to them by their progenitors. 
It is the rare felicity of a few individuals, in occasional periods 
of time, to be themselves the founders of great empires ; them- 
selves to plant the seed of laws, customs, and political doctrines, 
destined to spring up into a vigorous giovvth, overshadowing the 
world ; themselves to dictate the opinions and mould the desti- 



nies of nations unborn. This is indeed to emulate the creative 
energies and the mysterious prescience, which rank among the 
high attributes of the Omniscient ; and it was the subhme function 
performed by the great men of the primordial days of the RepubUc. 

English, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, each had come to the 
New World on their separate errand ; difTcring in language, in 
laws, and in customs ; most of them zealous in the cause of relig- 
ion, but without identity of religious faith ; Catholics fleeing from 
the persecution of Protestants, Protestants from the persecution of 
Catholics, and Protestants from the bigotry of fellow Protestants, 
as if to demonstrate that no sect of men is to be trusted with do- 
minion over the conscience of others ; all the victims of wrong at 
home, and all prepared by community of suffering to combine 
against a common oppressor, and to assume in due time the atti- 
tude of one great independent Republic in place of detached Col- 
onies held in forced and unnatural dependence on Europe. 

Forced and unnatural, I say ; for the truth is universal ; when- 
ever a European Colony has grown up to maturity, independence 
is its only congenial condition ; to cross the Atlantic for the laws 
which are to govern a society, and for the men who are to admin- 
ister those laws, is contrary to nature, which teaches men the right 
of self-government ; is unjust in principle, absurd in reason, and 
answers no other end but to misgovern the Colony for the gratifi- 
cation of the pride or the rapacity of the Mother Country. How- 
ever the interested sophistry of the foreign office-holders quartered 
on a Colony may seek to disguise the truth, it is to be taken as an 
axiom ofpolitical science, not only that liberty,but that even the good 
government of what is called a parental despotism, is in general in- 
compatible with the colonial condition. Present the fact in a tan- 
gible shape to the mind : suppose the people of the United States 
to be governed, not by a government in their own land, accessible 
to daily application, but situated four thousand miles off beyond 
sea, — not by magistrates and legislators of their own election, — 
not even by an hereditary prince and aristocracy whom they have 
any practicable means to influence, — but by some obscure and ir- 
responsible clerk in a bureau in London, wlio is absolute lord and 
dictator of their fortunes through the nominal authority of a Secre- 
tary of the Colonies or of Parliament. This, in substance, it is 
distinctly and officially admitted by loyalists and by patriots, by to- 
ries and by whigs, by Sir Francis Head and by the Earl of Dur- 
ham, is the predicament of the remaining British Provinces in Amer- 
ica at this moment, and this, it is equally certain, was the predica- 
ment of the United States before the Revolution. Abuses with- 
out limit or number are the spontaneous product of such a state of 
things ; and as there will at no time be any want of abundant jus- 
tificatory causes of revolution on the part of the Colony, so that 
question of revolution will not be one of right, which is at all times 
clear, but of expediency merely in the particular conjuncture ; for 
the colonial condition, I repeat, is incompatible with liberty or good 



government, and it is a temporary state, which must and will ever 
give place in the proper season to other and more fitting institutions. 

These are the principles of the American Revolution ; when at 
length, in the fullness of the accepted hour, sixty three years ago 
this day, the due time to rear the standard of independence had 
come, and the representatives of the United States of America in 
Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world 
for the rectitude of their intentions, issued, in the name of the good 
people of the Colonics, the solemn declaration, " That these Unit- 
ed Colonies are and of right ought to be, free and independent 
states ; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British 
crown, and that all political connexion between them and the state 
of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved ; and that as 
free and independent states they have full power to levy war, con- 
clude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all 
other acts and things, which independent states may of right do." 
To the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the pro- 
tection of Divine Providence, they mutually pledged to each other 
their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honors ; and generously, 
at the hazard of life and fortune, did they redeem that pledge in 
the long and eventful struggle of the War of Independence. 

If that war had been the ordinary event of oppressed subjects 
rising in arms to resist their oppressors, or of a dependent people 
seeking to become free and independent, still it would have been 
memorable in the annals of nations : — memorable for the lofty and 
disinterested patriotism of the men embarked in it ; for the appa- 
rent disproportion between the physical strength of the Colonies 
and that of the Mother Country ; for the union and self-devotion 
of the people ; and above all, for the purity and good faith which 
ended the revolution by the organization of the subsisting consti- 
tutional confederacy of the people of the United States. 

But that war was no such ordinary event of revolution. There 
was that in the war itself, and in the moral principles heralding 
its commencement, and consecrated by its conclusion, which rang 
in the ears of mankind as witli the trump of an archangel awak- 
ing the quick and the dead to judgment. It proclaimed to all me- 
tropolitan governments in Europe whatsoever, that their Colonies 
in the New World could no longer be held as the convenient 
means of the selfish aggrandisement of the Mother Country, to 
be governed or misgoverned at will as the caprice of irresponsible 
tyranny might dictate. It proclaimed that political equality is the 
birthright of men and of nations ; that the only just foundation 
of government'is the consent of the governed, and its only legiti- 
mate object their common good ; that if not based on moral right, 
it exists without right ; and that whenever existing government 
ceases to answer its only end, the promotion of thewelfare of the 
people, they may of right change it, and by force if need be, and 
remodel it according to their wants and occasions. It gave to 
Liberty a local habitation, and a visible substance, answering to the 



jiountl , that Liberty, the fond aspiration of so many sages and 
lierocs of the past, whose names hghtcn along the dark tracts ol 
the old time, like signal-fires upon a stormy coast, and who perish- 
ed not in vain so long as their memory remains embalmed for im- 
mortality in the admiration of after-ages, to prompt the emulation 
of their deeds ; that Liberty, which lovely though it were to the 
mind's eye in the rellected image of antique story, and dear to 
men's hearts and familiar to their lips in every age and country, 
yet like the masterpiece of Pygmalion's statuary art, was but a 
cold inanimate marble, until this new revelation as it were of the 
eternal truth that all just human government stands upon the con- 
sent of the governed, measured and controlled by moral right, 
breathed the spirit of life through the senseless stone, and animat- 
ed it into a creature of incarnate beneficence and beauty for the 
world to bow down and worship. This is the striking and charac- 
teristic peculiarity of the American Revolution, which makes it 
to stand out amid surrounding events in bold relief, like a monu- 
mental column on a hill-top, a spectacle and a beacon to the na- 
tions alike of the Old World and the New. 

But these are the customary and familiar topics of the present 
occasion ; and I propose to touch upon a larger theme. 

The present time is but a point in space ; it is an evanescent 
point ; whilst you speak of it, it is gone ; if you stretch forth the 
hand to grasp it, it has already glided away into that past time, 
which belongs to history ; and you yourself continue to be hur- 
ried along towards the illimitable depths of the infinite Iiereafter. 
And while the epoch in which we live is on6 of general activity, 
our own land is the theatre of peculiar rapidity of progression. 
Minute, however, and intangible, as is the present moment, it is 
the point of vision, from which we regard the past and speculate 
upon the future. Just as in the ordinary prospect, so here, that 
which immediately surrounds us, we distinguish in its actual mag- 
nitude and true shape ; it occupies our perceptions ; it engages 
our thoughts ; it kindles our passions ; and its interests engross 
a disproportioncd and therefore undue share of our attention and 
our estimation. That which is far off, on the contrary, is indis- 
tinct, and reduced in apparent dimensions by the distance, until 
it gradually sinks into the horizon ; and as it ceases from the 
sight;, it loses its proper estimate in the mind's eye. Yet in the 
[)rcscnt lies hid the germ of the future ; and the resolution or act 
of today draws after it the events of tomorrow, which, obscure as 
they may be to human sight, are of necessity the more imixntant 
objects of human care. It is one of the beneficial incidents of 
occasions like this, the amiivcrsarics of great events in the liistory 
of the nation, that we are naturally prompted to pause upon our 
steps, to arrest, in imagination at least, the career of perpetual pro- 
gression and change, and to consider well not only that which is, 
but that which has been, and above uU, thai which is to be, in the 
national destinies and condition of the United Stutcy. 






7 

Fellow citizens, it is not for the idle purpose of self-gratiilatioii, 
iior in order to awaken emotions of national vanity,- — but for a high- 
er object, that I ask you to call to mind the fact, that only half a 
century has elapsed this year since the first Congress of the Unit- 
ed States under the Constitution assembled at New York, and the 
Revolution was consummated by the organization of the Federal 
Union. There are single reigns of European princes much ex- 
ceeding that period in length. It is far short of the allotted du- 
ration of human life. There are still living, those who witnessed 
the first inauguration of the President of the United States. 
Nay, there still survive among us not a few gray headed veterans 
of the War of Independence, — and long may they continue to 
wear the laurels they have gloriously earned, and to enjoy the 
grateful respect of us whose liberty and prosperity their blood 
purchased, — venerable men, who in the ardor of their youthful 
courage and patriotism, mustered to man the heights of Bunker's 
Hill at the hour of their country's need, whose undaunted spirit 
quailed not in the disasters of the retreat through the Jerseys or 
the sufferings of Valley Forge, and whose gallantry gained them 
illustrious recompense in the triumphs of Saratoga and of York- 
town, and who yet remain to a green old age, the living monu- 
ments of those days of trial and of glory, which distinguished the 
era of the Revolution. Nay more. — It is but a brief period, — 
brief in the comparative history of nations, — since the banks of 
the beautiful Connecticut, which now flows beneath our eyes 
amid smiling plenty, and all the grateful signs of civilization, 
peace, and moral and material cultivation, were the haunt of wan- 
dering barbarians, or of wild beasts scarce more savage than the 
men who hunted them for food ; but a brief period, since the 
little companies of Englishmen landing at Jamestown, at Ply- 
mouth, and at Salem, planted in the wilderness the humble begin- 
nings of the great parent Colonies of Virginia and Massachusetts, 

What a contrast is presented to us in the existing population, 
resources, productions, strength, and prospects of the United 
States ! W'e, the handful of settlers at Jamestown and Salem, — - 
we, the half peopled Colonies who were compelled to struggle 
hard for independence against the then fearful odds of the power 
of Great Britain, — we have grown to be a mighty nation, the 
equal in just pretensions, the comjietitor in wealth and commerce, 
and the rival in physical strength, of the proudest among the king- 
doms of Europe. Not only have we grown to this astonishing 
height with equally astonishing rapidity, but we have outstripped 
our own perceptions of the fact. We ourselves are not fully sen- 
sible of the strength and vigor of the young giant's limbs. I saw 
continual proof of this in the groundless iears, which not long 
since prevailed, in certain quarters at least, that England would 
take umbrage, and rush into war with us, when we told her, in 
the only language befitting the occasion, that the time for aggres> 
sion on the United States was gone by, and that as we had taken 



8 i 



up arms once to obtain independence, and again to vindicate the 
liberty of the seas, wo should not shrink from doing it a third time, 
if need were, to maintain the inviolability of our native land. 
They, I say, who apprehended that Great Britain would, for the 
hope of acquiring a few additional square miles of territory in 
America, press the United States to the issue of war, undervalu- 
ed the absolute strength of their country and the patriotism of 
their countrymen ; they did not realize the greatness of our pow- 
er ; they failed to perceive that the only probable conclusion of a 
new struggle between us and Great Britain, provoked by new ag- 
gressions on her part, must and would be the total extinction of 
the last remnant of European authority in North America. For 
the Anglo-American race has now attained that pitch of elevation^ 
which renders it certain that, whatever other political communities 
there may be on the Continent, whether they be dependent or in- 
dependent states, — submissive vassals of foreign masters, or the 
self-governed masters of their native land, — whatever they may 
be, the United States are, and will be in moral influence and in 
material force, the leading Power of the New World. 

Much has been addressed continually to popular audiences, on 
occasions like this, concerning the political principles of the Re- 
volution and of the Constitution. I propose rather, in continu- 
ance of the present train of reflection, to exhibit the territorial 
progress and physical force of the United States in their relation 
to the moral and political character of our institutions and people, 
as acting upon and acted upon by each other, and cooperating in 
the development of the material resources of North America. 
For this, though less discussed than the other, is a more practical 
question, of permanent importance, and perpetually recurring upon 
us in every contingency of public afTairs ; and therefore one which 
it is desirable should be thoroughly and universally understood. 

You know, that, at the conclusion of the War of Independence, 
the nominal limits of the United States were the British Provin- 
ces as now on the north, the Mississippi on the west, and Louisiana 
and Florida on the south west and south. But the practical limits 
were much less. Stretched along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean 
were the thirteen original United States, New Hampshire, Massa- 
chusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Penn- 
sylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South 
Carolina and Georgia, which by the Treaty of Peace the king of 
Great Britain acknowledges to be free, sovereign, and independent 
states ; that he treats with them as such, and relinquishes all claims 
to the government, property, and territorial rights of the same, and 
every part thereof. Massacliusetts, her actual limits reaching only 
a hundred miles inland from thesea,'and Virginia, scarcely settled 
farther, were then foremost among the States in wealth and popula- 
tion. New York, her rich interior yet unoccupied, was very far 
short of her present empire dimensions. Pennsylvania was but just 
proceeding to occupy the slope of the Alleghanies, The hardy 



pioneers of Kentucky and Tennessee, offshoots of Virginia and 
North CaroHna, had scarcely begun to cross the mountains, and to 
acquire in the long struggle with the savages around them, the 
qualities of courage, hardihood, gallantry, and spirit, which they 
have transmitted to their sons. Vermont, though not yet recog- 
nized as a separate State, had by the patriotism of her children 
secured the right to be so considered, and as such admitted in 
due time into the Union. Maine, known only as a portion of 
.Massachusetts, was in the chief part of it an untrodden wil* 
derness. Thus, over a space of fifteen hundred miles along the 
Atlantic Ocean were the then United States scattered, covering 
in comparison with the vast interior of the Continent, only as it 
were a riband of sea beach, with a sparse population amounting 
to but about a third part of that of the Union at the present time. 
Add to which that in several of the middle and southern States 
were numerous tribes of Indians, most of them stimulated into 
hostility against us by the iniquitous policy of Great Britain, and 
thus constituting a body of internal and frontier enemies, who 
pressed back the population, and prevented or checked the full 
cultivation and settlement of those States. 

Restricted and embarrassed at the conclusion of Peace as the 
United States were, territorially speaking, their material condition 
in other respects was still less auspicious of their present great- 
ness. As yet, none of the States had prosecuted the cultivation 
of cotton, which now constitutes our greatest staple of exchangea- 
ble production for the purchase of foreign commodities ; nor in- 
deed was the demand for this article in Europe such as to render 
it an object of extensive and profitable culture. Our commerce 
labored under a multitude of impediments, foreign and domestic. 
Preeminent among the latter, in addition to the absence of most 
of the present mass of exportable products, was the political con- 
dition of the country under the old Confederation, so imperfect 
in its organization, so impracticable in operation, as neither to give 
us respect and confidence abroad, nor consistency and stabili- 
ty at home. The field of our commercial enterprise was 
chiefly confined to Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and the 
Netherlands ; but though at peace with all these nations, we were 
still involved in serious controversies with several of them ; their 
selfish policy of metropolitan monopoly nearly shut out our ships 
from the commerce of their Colonies ; the Baltic was yet scarce 
explored by us ; the Mediterranean, and the many rich countries 
which occupy its shores, were almost sealed against us by the pi- 
racies of the Barbary States ; and our merchants were yet un- 
known to the immense population of the Asiatic world. Britain, 
France, and Spain, jealous of our capacity for greatness, and with 
good cause fearful of the influence of those principles of demo- 
cratic right which our Revolution proclaimed, were little disposed 
to do justice to our national pretensions. Great Britain, especial- 
ly, soured by the humiliations she had undergone in the War of 
2 



10 

Independence, and not unhopeful that in the chapter of chances 
the Union might fall in pieces of itself, and she regain a part at 
least of her lost possessions, continued, in violation of the Treaty 
of Peace, to maintain garrisons in some of the most important 
points of our western territory, and kept alive the animosity of 
the Indians against us by counsel, presents, and subsidies, as indeed 
she has persisted in doing to the present day. Hemmed in by 
European Colonies on the north, the west, and the south, we saw 
closed against us the mouth of the Mississippi, the sole outlet of 
the commerce of the West. Of manufactures, we possessed com- 
paratively none, except in the form of the most ordinary handi- 
craft and household productions ; for the Confederation had no 
power to give either to our commerce or our manufactures that 
national protection, without which the one must languish, and the 
other could not begin to exist. Each of the States, and especial- 
ly the most patriotic among them, staggered under the burden of 
the enormous debts, public and private, incurred by the protrac- 
ted War of Independence. In a word, the UnitedStates, while 
possessed of all the moral and material elements of greatness, were 
feeble, inert, almost powerless, by reason of those great obstacles 
to the development of their strength, which seemed likely to doom 
them to such a sickly existence of poverty and anarchy as we have 
since seen exemplified in the republics of Spanish America. 

But the patriots of the Revolution were thoughtful, wise, and 
farseeing men. They discerned the evil, and they discerned the 
remedy. Not for this poor consummation, not to see their beloved 
country impoverished and distracted at home, or depressed and 
trodden upon abroad, had they fought the battles of the P^evolu- 
tion. They had achieved independence. In securing the recog- 
nition of this, they had verified the abstract principles of the Dec- 
laration of Independence with which they started ; they had es- 
tablished the eternal truth, or rather, as Franklin did not create 
but drew down the lightning from Heaven, they had made that 
eternal truth their own, and had fixed it on earth by human act 
and institution, — the truth of the natural right of man to self- 
government, under moral responsibility always to the Supreme 
Arbiter of the universe. It remained for them to render the peo- 
ple of the thirteen United States one people, to impart nationality 
to them, and to give to them suitable institutions of government, 
sheltered and guarded by which the industrial energies of the peo- 
ple might he called into full play, and the United States enter up- 
on the fulfillment of the great destiny marked out for them by na- 
ture and by circumstances, of peopling and cultivating the Con- 
tinent of North America. This they accomplished by the organi- 
zation of the present government, when the people of the United 
States, for the purposes so clearly though succinctly set forth in 
the instrument itself, in order to form a more perfect union, es- 
tablish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the com- 
mon defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the bless- 



11 

fngs of liberty to themselves and their posterity, did ordain and 
establish the Constitution of the United States. 

Then was perceived what mighty things a free people, with 
well-devised political institutions, and adequate natural advanta- 
tages, may do. For, all these things the people of the United 
States now had. Long ago it was said of the Athenians, that, 
controlled by one man, they exerted themselves feebly, because 
exertion was for a master ; regaining liberty, each man was made 
zealous, because his zeal was for himself, and his individual in- 
terest was the common weal. And so it was with the people of 
the United States. By the force of their own right arms, and the 
help of Almighty God, they were free. In the constitution and 
laws of the several States, they possessed abundant guarantees for 
the assurance of the freedom they had conquered. The Federal 
Union gave to them unity as a nation, so far as regards all ques- 
tions of exterior relation, and of their necessary relations among 
themselves, either as one people, or as the separate peoples of so 
many confederated sovereign States. Thus they had resolved 
the problem of giving to small republics the exterior strength and 
capacity of power hitherto enjoyed only by great empires ; and 
of giving to a great empire the interior development and local 
and personal freedom proper to small republics. The vast Con- 
tinent of North America was before them where to choose, 
for the expansion of their population. And they had those 
qualities of mind and character, that moral vigor, that bold and 
hardy enterprise, that unconfinable and unconquerable impulse of a 
free spirit conscious of its own inborn energies and rights, which 
neither the hostility of Britain, nor the intrigues of France and 
Spain, nor any earthly power, could hinder from the brilliant 
career preordained for us by eternal Providence. 

Accordingly, the population of the United States, which in 
1790 was but four millions, is now sixteen or seventeen millions. 
The revolutionary debt of near eighty millions of dollars has been 
wholly discharged without any sensible inconvenience to the people, 
and that in the face of a maritime war with France, a general 
war with England, conflicts with the Barbary States, many Indian 
wars, and the perpetual progress of most expensive establishments 
of education, commerce and internal communication ; while in 
the same period the war debts of other nations have been devour- 
ing their private substance and crippling their public energies. 
The annual current revenues of the United States have in the 
same period increased from five millions to twenty five ; our com- 
mercial tonnage from half a million to two millions ; our annual 
foreign exports from twenty millions of dollars, to one hundred 
and forty millions ; and our trading ships, then chiefly confined in 
their range to a portion of Europe and the West Indies, now dis- 
pute with those of Great Britain the palm of maritime ascenden- 
cy in every quarter of the globe. Nor has our national growth in 
territory been less remarkable ; for^ straightened no longer in the 



12 

narrow strip between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic Oceaifi^ 
our population has swarmed into the valley of the Mississippi, occu- 
pied the region of the lakes, possessed itself of Louisiana and 
Florida, and is now looking beyond the Rocky Mountains to the 
shores of the great Pacific Sea ; and every where it has carried 
with it the laws, the institutions, the religion, the combined love 
of order and love of freedom, the industrial energy and 
activity, and the monuments of art, knowledge, and com- 
merce, and the general civilization, which our European fore- 
fathers brought hither with them, and which, wherever their chil- 
dren are found, testify to the blood and the principles of the origi- 
nal colonists of the United States. 

Doubtless, the custom of grossly exaggerating the natural ad- 
vantages of one's own country is to be deprecated, as in bad 
taste, to say the least of it. Still it is fastidious, and the result of 
a superficial view of things, to complain of men for being rationally 
proud of their father land. National pride, so long as it does not 
degenerate into a blind prejudice against public improvement, is a 
just, a laudable, a useful pride. It is intimately associated with 
all that is most noble in the aspirations of a people after excel- 
lence, and in devotion to their country's honor and welfare. 
Who, among the nations of the old world, were more proud of 
their native land than the Greeks? Who among the Greeks than 
the Athenians ? Who rated themselves by a more exalted stan- 
dard, or in their language, writings, and acts more confidently ar- 
rogated the intellectual, as by their arms and policy they attained 
the territorial, empire of the earth, than the Romans ? And yet 
these were the men, to whom belonged successively the mastery 
of their times. And their example proved, what indeed all 
history confirms, that a confidence in our powers, a convic- 
tion of our superiority, and a high trust in our destinies, 
are indispensably requisite to the attainment of extraordina- 
ry greatness as a nation. A people, emulous of prosperity, 
should resolve, not to magnify into a prodigy every peculiar trait of 
condition or character belonging to them, but to feel the most 
hearty assurance of their own national capabilities, in order to 
effect the full development of their particular elements of politi- 
cal exaltation. Place a people, therefore, in the necessity of 
struggling against natural difficulties, provided those difficulties 
be superable ; give to them the personal qualities adapted to their 
situation, with a due admixture of the sentiment of national 
pride and love of country to stimulate and sustain their efforts ; 
and greatness comes to them in the inevitable course of events, 
as naturally and certainly as the harvest follows the seed time. 

In the material progress of the United States, the operation of 
these causes is manifest ; and the territorial progression of the 
country has been marked by stages, each of them peculiar, and all 
objects of interest and importance. 

When, at the close of the fifteenth century, the Cabots had, 



13 

in the service of the King of England, sailed along the Atlantic 
coast of North America, that prince claimed the right of jurisdic- 
tion and sovereignty over the country by the title of discovery. 
But the English were at that time and long after profoundly 
ignorant of the extent and geographical divisions of the interior 
of the Continent. As the various chartered companies proceed- 
ed to establish colonies here, they obtained charters, granting to 
them the property and dominion of enormous tracts of land, 
equal in size to the kingdoms of the Old World, but defined with 
the looseness and inaccuracy of mere conjecture. Thus the Colo- 
ny of Massachusetts had in the outset a grant of all the lands ex- 
tending north and south from three miles north of the Merrimac to 
three miles south of Charles river ; and " in length and longitude, 
of and within all the breadth aforesaid, throughout the main lands 
there, from the Atlantic and Western Sea and Ocean on the east 
part to the South Sea on the west part ;" and when from time to 
time Plymouth, Maine and other territories were annexed to Mas- 
sachusetts, the same extent from sea to sea was continued to the 
original Colony. A similar grant was made to Connecticut. The 
English government, it is manifest could never have intended to 
found Colonies of such an impracticable form as those grants in 
fact make, a narrow belt running inland from one side of the 
globe to the other like the space between two parallels of latitude. 
To Virginia was given a grant yet more absurd, and in terms im- 
possible indeed, it being described as of that " part of America 
called Virginia, from the point of land called Cape or Point Com- 
fort all along the sea coast to the southward two hundred miles; 
and all the space and circuit of land lying from the sea coast of 
the precincts aforesaid up into the land throughout from sea to 
sea west and north west." A glance at the map will show to you 
the geographical nonsense of this description. Accordingly, the 
Government, without respecting the indefinite extent, west and 
south west, of these grants, proceeded to eslablish Colonies, such as 
Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania, which ran up, not with- 
out something of the same indefiniteness, behind and within the 
others ; so that several of the Colonies, according to the terms of 
the original charters, lapped over each other, and had conflicting 
and incompatible pretensions towards the interior of the Continent. 
Meanwhile, another power, France, availing itself of the slow- 
ness and supineness of England in this matter, had planted its 
standard on the St. Lawrence and the Lakes, and thence along in 
the valley of the Mississippi, spanning around the English Colo- 
nies with a cordon of posts in their rear from the extreme north- 
east to the extreme southwest; so that although England and the 
English Colonies succeeded in breaking off one end of this chain 
by the conquest of Canada, yet the Mississippi remained, at the 
time of the Revolution, and by the terms of the Treaty of Peace, 
the western limit of the United States. 



14 

This treaty recognizes, in the first place, all the territorial rights 
of the thirteen United States and each by name, and every part 
thereof. All the claims of separate jurisdiction and sovereignty 
appertaining to either of the States were in this way secured to 
them respectively. The treaty then proceeds to say : " And that 
all dispute which might arise in future, on tlie subject of the boun- 
daries of the said United States may be prevented, it is hereby 
agreed and declared, that the following are and shall be tlieir 
boundaries ;" and then comes a description, not of the separate 
boundaries of each State, but of the general boundaries of the 
whole United States. 

Understanding these preliminary facts, we shall be prepared to 
consider the gravest and most difficult of all the public questions, 
which occupied the country in the interval between the conclusion 
of the vyar, and the formation of the Federal Constitution. What 
disposition should be made of the immense public domain lying 
untenanted within the boundaries marked out by the Treaty of 
Peace ? To whom did it belong, — to the United States in the ag- 
gregate, or to the separate States? There was indeed little com- 
parative difficulty in assigning a de facto western limit to most of 
the Colonies, by the collation of their several grants, and of de- 
finitive orders or proclamations, issued by the English government 
and acquiesced in by the Colonies concerned. Thus, Virginia, 
North Carolina, and Georgia, would extend due west to the Mis- 
sissippi, South Carolina being cut short between the two latter; a 
part of the northwestern claims of Virginia would be concluded 
by the position of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and of the western 
claims of Connecticut and Massachusetts, by the interposition of 
New York. By recognizing these limits, most of the tliirteen 
States came into possession of a vast public domain as their own 
separate property ; consisting of the crown, charter, and propri- 
etary lands within their immediate bounds ; as was very signally 
the case with New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New 
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and 
Georgia. Some of these States have husbanded their public lands, 
retaining more or less at the present time ; others disposed of 
them, whether providently or not is immaterial, since it was at any 
rate according to their own views of their own interest. In some 
instances, the separate domain of a State would be such as to in- 
dicate the necessity or expediency of erecting a new State out of 
it; and thus, in the progress of time, Kentucky, Tennessee, and 
Maine were organized and received into the Union. One State, 
it is to be remembered, Vermont, established itself in the course 
of the Revolution, by the spontaneous act of its inhabitants, 
repudiating as well the authority of the Crown, as the claim of 
jurisdiction over them asserted by New Hampshire and New York. 
But, these points being contingently settled, the grave question 
still remained, to whom belonged the immense region north 



15 

and west of the Ohio ? What disposition should be made of this 
region, then overrun by Indians ? And of the western part of 
Georgia, also oecupied by populous tribes of Indians, and lying 
between hostile foreign Colonies ? Massachusetts and Connec- 
ticut, for instance, claimed that the express terms of their re- 
spective charters should be satisfied. Virginia claimed the whole 
North West, by virtue of the word ' northwest' in her charter. 
Others of the States resisted these extravagant pretensions ; urged 
that such grants would be held void for uncertainty in any court ; 
that the charters themselves had been cancelled ; that the western 
and northwestern limits of the Colonies claimant had been again 
and again defined and settled by recognized acts of the Crown ; 
that those Colonies ought to be content with the vast public do- 
main within their admitted limits ; and that the lands in the North 
West, having been conquered from Britain by the common blood 
and treasure of all the States, should be reserved and sold for the 
joint benefit of all. At length, the spirit of concession and com- 
promise appropriate to their condition, and the sentiment of over- 
ruling patriotism by which the great men of that day were char- 
acterized, prevailed against all sordid motives or narrow conside- 
rations, and Virginia, and the other States claimant, relinquished, 
with some minor reservations, {ill their claims to the territory 
northwest of the Ohio, which now became the undisputed property 
of the United States. 

The disposition of this territory, its preparation for settlers, and 
the government to be given to them, were the next important 
object of consideration ; and this point was controlled by two pre- 
dominant ideas, one of them emanating from Virginia, the other 
from Massachusetts, whicli were incorporated into the very being 
of the territory, by successive ordinances of Congress. 

Of these two ideas, the Virginia idea, originally proposed in 
Congress by Mr. Jefferson in 1784, and though not then adopt- 
ed, yet finally sanctioned in 1787 by the great fundamental ordi- 
nance of the North West, was, that, in addition to republican 
government, which was a thing of course, the territory should 
enjoy the benefit of the unadulterated and unimpaired principles 
of the Declaration of Independence, and therefore involuntary 
servitude should be forever excluded from it. This provision of 
the ordinance in fact abolished the institution of slavery then ex- 
isting within the territory. It dedicated the territory to unmix- 
ed liberty forever. It rendered liberty the very tenure by which 
the lands in the territory were to be held and occupied. I re- 
member having seen with particular interest in the Castle of 
Windsor a group of small wliite banners, deposited there by the 
Duke of Wellington ; the rich lands of Strathfieldsaye having 
been presented to him by Parliament in recompense and honor of 
his public achievements, on condition of annual service to the 
Crown by presentation of a knight's banderol. It seemed to 
me a most appropriate and beautiful idea, that the victor of 



16 

Hindu Assaye, of Ciudad Rodrigo, Vittoria and Waterloo, 
should hold his lands by the very emblem and tenure as it were 
of victory. It is in like manner the condition of the settlement 
of the North West, that the settlers shall hold it by the tenure of 
perpetual liberty. I rejoice to be able to present this to you as 
an idea proceeding from Virginia ; for that great Commonwealth 
did not then, as I trust it does not now, profess to belie the doc- 
trines of the Revolution by considering slavery any thing else but a 
curse and a blot on our institutions ; nor had she then so refined 
away the functions of government by metaphysical subtleties, as 
to maintain, which she now does, that her Legislature has not 
power to abolish slavery within her own limits. There stands the 
ordinance of the North West, to admonish her of the true princi- 
ples of her own constitutional power and of eternal right. 

The other was a Massachusetts idea. Every land-holder in 
Massachusetts derives his title, either directly or indirectly, from 
the Colony, Province, or Commonwealth. There is not an acre 
of land in the State, the fee of which does not come from its gov- 
ernment. In the old time, whenever individuals made suitable 
application to the General Court, a tract of land for a township 
was granted to them ; and they became organized at once into three 
corporations, namely, the township, or municipal body ; the pro- 
prietors ; and the parish. At first, these bodies were all identical ; 
but at length they became in general separate ; though cases still 
exist of the continued identity of two of these bodies, and it may 
possibly be of all. From the body of proprietors each individual 
received his share, subject always to the sovereign rights of the 
Commonwealth. Those old proprietors, the men of the Colony 
of Massachusetts, were actuated by peculiar inducements. They 
did not come hither, as military invaders in pursuit of conquests, 
like the Spaniards. Nor were they mercantile or agricultural 
speculators, like many of the settlers in other parts of the country. 
Their object was a purely intellectual one, a sentiment, an idea, 
a principle. They were enthusiasts, bigoted if you please, but still 
highmindedones, engaged in a great and generous political experi- 
ment. Their object was the combination of civil freedom with in- 
tellectual and moral instruction and religious truth. They rid them- 
selves of the burden of feudal tenures. They established municipal 
institutions and free representative assemblies of legislation. They 
made partition of inheritances among all their children. On board 
the May Flower the pilgrims of Plymouth had entered into a com- 
pact for their future government on shore, and thus gave the first ex- 
ample of a written political constitution. They in fact began the 
propagation of those principles, which led to the independence of 
the United States, and the formation of the Union. But they 
were men, also, who knew and estimated the value of intellectual, 
moral, and religious instruction, and who believed that, without 
this, liberty would soon degenerate into licentiousness, and pass 
first into anarchy and then to despotism. Accordingly, they founded 



17 

colleges, and provided schools and churches, and made the uni- 
versal instruction of all classes of the community one of the obli- 
gations of government. Mindful of these great objects, in all 
their grants of land, the General Court reserved in each township 
one lot for schools, one for the parish, and one for the first settled 
minister of the Gospel ; and this became universal ; and after the 
adoption of the State government the practice of reservations for 
education and religion, and for roads also, was systematized by a 
standing law ; and such was from the beginning and is now the in- 
ternal policy of Massachusetts, 

Well, in the course of God's providence, the subject Colonies 
were become an independent nation, with a vast interior domain, 
the property of the United States. Massachusetts was a member 
of that Union, having a voice, — shall I not say, a leading voice ? 
— in its councils. What did she do ? She proposed and she 
effected the dedication of one thirty sixth part of the soil of the 
North-West to the purpose of educating its future inhabitants ; 
and this, with perpetual freedom, and other incidents of republi- 
can institutions, became the fundamental law of the territory. 
And I have looked upon the late attempts in Congress to disturb 
this arrangement, under pretext of making compensation to the 
Old States for the lands set apart for education in the New, as 
little better than sacrilege, and as the violation of a compact not 
less binding than the Constitution itself. But however this may 
be, certain it is, that, consequently upon the wise measures adopt- 
ed by the Congress of the Confederation, that which in 1789 was 
a howling wilderness, now contains the great States and Terri- 
tories of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, with a 
population but little short of that of the whole United States at 
the time of the Revolution. 

This was the first grand step in the augmentation of the power 
of the United States. Next followed the conclusion of a long 
adjourned question with the State of Georgia, by which, in 1802, 
for adequate consideration, the latter ceded fo the United States 
the territory now comprised in the States of Alabama and Mississip- 
pi. And thus had the United States, by extending its settlements 
to the left bank of the Mississippi, and by organizing either State 
or Territorial governments in all the region between the Allegha- 
nies and that river, rendered the control of its navigation necessary 
to our peace and prosperity, and prepared the way for the acqui- 
sition of Louisiana. Hitherto, the population of the United 
States had been confined to the hmits fixed by the Treaty of 
Peace ; but events were now in train, which extended the Re- 
public from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the 
Gulf of Mexico. 

At that time, Florida and Louisiana, after being for a while 

held, the former by England and the latter by Spain, were now 

restored to their original masters, Florida to Spain, and Louisiana 

to France. While Spain was in possession of both Florida and 

3 



18 

Louisiana, she had, as I have before stated, endeavored to shackle 
the growing strength of the Union, by excluding our settlements 
in the West from their natural and indispensable access to the 
sea ; she had intrigued with them to produce a dismemberment of 
the Republic ; she exerted, or enabled others to exert, a most un- 
friendly influence over the Indians within our acknowledged lim- 
its ; and thus held in check the whole of the South and West, as 
Great Britain now does the whole of the North and East, through 
her possessions on the St. Lawrence. By traaty with France in 
1803, we obtained the cession of Louisiana, and became the sole 
master of the magnificent Valley of the Mississippi, the most 
unique territory on the face of the globe : and from Spain, in 
1819, we obtained the two Florida?, and an unequivocal title to 
the important region between the Rocky Mountains and the Pa- 
cific Ocean. Each of these events was associated with analogous 
considerations of constitutional right and political expediency, 
which were fully discussed and settled, on occasion of the pur- 
chase of Louisiana, and require a passing notice in this connec- 
tion. 

On the one hand, with all the ardor of honest zeal, and the 
force of legal ingenuity, it was denied that under the Constitution 
the Federal Government had any power to acquire new territory ; 
it was contended, that, although, by express terms, " New States 
may be admitted, by the Congress, into this Union," yet the clause 
intended States formed from the existing territory, and excluded 
any from without; that this acquisition would be only the first st«p 
in a series of acquisitions, dangerous to the tranquillity, and fatal 
to the interests, of the original States ; and that by it the Consti- 
tution was overthrown, the several States absolved from the moral 
obligations of the contract, and it had become the right of all, 
and the duty of some of the States, to prepare for the inevitable 
event of the dissolution of the Union. 

On the other hand, it was replied with like zeal and force, that 
the Constitution expressly authorized the Government to hold 
territory ; that such territory could be acquired either under the 
indefinite scope of the war power, or the treaty power ; that Lou- 
isiana having been acquired by treaty, that treaty, as the supreme' 
law of the land, made the territory an integral part of the Union ; 
that the power of Congress to admit new States was indefinite, 
without any negation in terms of territory without the Union ; 
that in point of historical fact that clause was puri)osely so word- 
ed in order to admit the Canadas into the Union, if circumstances 
should render this just and proper in itself; that the admission of 
Louisiana would be of the greatest possible benefit to the Atlan- 
tic States, by affording a market for their fish, manufactures, and 
other merchandizes, and business for their shipping, and by the 
general augmentation of the industrial resources of the country; 
that it was of vital consequence to the Western States ; that if it 
augmented the political weight of the South, it augmented the 



19 

material strength and industrial prosperity of the North ; that it was 
advantageous therefore, in one way or another, to every one of the 
Old States ; that instead of justifying, or tending to promote, the 
dissolution of the Union, the annexation of it, and this alone, would 
prevent the speedy dismemberment of the Union, by removing 
the temptation and almost the necessity of the States in the Valley 
of the Mississippi to unite with Louisiana in forming a separate 
republic ; and that if any doubt remained with regard to the con- 
stitutional power, the immeasurable importance of the measure 
should come in aid of ttie doubt, and settle it in favor of the pow- 
er to receive Louisiana into the Union. 

Happily for the peace, honor, and prosperity of the United 
States, these considerations prevailed. Whatever doubts then 
existed of the constitutional power of the government to acquire 
territory from without the limits of the Union as it stood at the 
time of its formation, that question was settled by the admission 
of Louisiana ; and the precedent was followed, with no serious con- 
troversy, on occasion of the cession of Florida ; and now that one 
half of the actual extent of the United States consists of territory 
so acquired, the point is placed beyond all reasonable debate. 
To the Southern States, the effect of these acquisitions has been 
to give them a maritime frontier on the Gulf of Mexico ; to shut 
out all foreign influences from the interior of that part of the 
country ; and to open to them a new held of industrial enterprise. 
To the West, it has been the creation of that splendid domain 
thronged with prosperous freemen, who cover the Father of Wa- 
ters, and his thousand tributary streams, with floating palaces, 
weighed (lov\in by the rich productions of that unequalled Valley. 
For the East, need I ask you where is now the great market for our 
manufactories and our fisheries, where the chief resource of our 
coasting trade and our freighting ships, where the heritage of our 
sons, when our growing population crowds upon ourselves, — 
where, but in the fertile regions of the Valley of the Mississippi ? 
And deeply were they mistaken, who prophesied that the acquisi- 
tion of Louisiana was to weaken the bands of the Union. On 
the contrary, I do most fully believe, — nay, I know, that the effect 
has been the reverse. We can look back at this time on the ill- 
omened predictions of that day, and see their evident fallacy. So 
long as a foreign Power held the western bank of the Mississippi,^ 
through its whole length, and its mouth on both sides, there was, 
and there could be, neither peace, prosperity, nor contentment 
among the people of the Western States. Their geographical 
position knit Jhem more closely to each other, and to the Missis- 
sippi, than to the States on the Atlantic. To prevent the annex- 
ation of Louisiana to the Union would have been to prompt and im- 
pel those States to seize it by force themselves, and, if that were the 
alternative, to build up a separate empire of their own in the heart 
of the Continent. And as things now are, the Mississippi is the 
bond of union to all the States : it is the silver cord on which 



20 

the otherwise separate pearls of the Union are strung and held 
together. Take an example. Massachusetts and South Carolina 
are insulated from each other ; New York and North Carolina are 
insulated from each other ; they have no point of actual contact ; 
they have no geographical connection by rivers or otherwise. But 
North Carolina crosses the Alleghanies, and thus associates itself 
geographically with the West : so does New York ; and thus 
New York and North Carolina have a common point of associa- 
tion. But Massachusetts and South Carolina neither touch one 
another, nor do they reach into the Valley of the Mississippi ; but 
they are geographically connected, the one with New York and 
the other with North Carolina, and thus the round of association 
is completed. Without particularizing other individual States, it 
may be stated as the general fact, that while the States of the ex- 
treme East and the extreme South are held together, not by mu- 
tual contact, but by contact with the great States of the centre, 
so the States of the Mississippi are a tie of union to the latter, and 
through them to the entire mass of the United States. 

To this exhibition of the progress of the material growth of the 
United States, there is one other fact of the same class to be sub- 
joined, which is, the gradual removal, chiefly since the year 1829, 
of most of the Indian tribes from the east to the west side of the 
Mississippi. Without pausing to speak of the specific merits oi 
a measure so generally condemned, as to its time and manner at 
least, by the people of Massachusetts, I remark only, with regard 
to its political efl'ects, — first, that its operation upon the Slates 
from which the Indians have been removed has been [)recisely the 
same as the acquisition of new territory ; secondly, that this ope- 
ration has benefited both slaveholding and non-slaveholding States, 
the acquisitions in the North West corresponding to those in the 
South West ; thirdly, that, if, — which has been said, though I 
know no evidence of the fact, — if there is any reason to believe one 
of the original inducements of this measure to have been the an- 
ticipated advancement of the slave interest, — if any such calcula- 
tion was made, the result has defeated it, both on this side of the 
Mississippi, and still more on the other, inasmuch as, of the lands 
ceded to the United States by the Indians since 1829, there lie 
81,530,297 acres within the free States or Territories, and only 
28,320,160 acres within the slave-holding States or Territories; 
and inasmuch as the removed Indians are mostly collected south 
of the line of the Missouri compromise, leaving the rich and ca- 
pacious territory of Iowa open to the growth of freedom, — while 
in addition to Missouri and Arkansas, no new slaveholding States 
can well be constructed in the limits of the old Colony of Louisiana. 

Fellow citizens, I have placed before you the picture of the 
past progress of the United States. I have said nothing of 
the foreign wars or of the domestic dissensions upon ques- 
tions of temporary public policy, which have from time to time 
agitated the country, because the sources of its prosperity lie too 



SI 

deep to have been greatly impeded or greatly accelerated in their 
action, by such superficial causes. You see how in the short 
space of fifty years the territorial surface of the Union has been 
doubled, how its inhabitants have increased four fold, and its pro- 
ductive resources seven fold ; and how the number of the con- 
federate Republics has been augmented from thirteen to twenty- 
six, or rather twenty nine T may say, including three populous 
Territories, which must very soon be ranked as States. Shall I 
proceed ? Shall I venture on the bold undertaking to lift the veil 
which covers the unseen future, and to speculate concerning that 
which the United States are to become? Something of this we 
may safely attempt, so far at least as we have sure facts on which 
to proceed. 

Cast your eyes for a moment on the map of North America. 
Extending inward through the broadest part of the Continent, you 
see a chain of great lakes on the line where the land and the 
streams slope ot?, on the one hand towards the inhospitable and 
scarce habitable regions of the Arctic Sea, and on the other to- 
wards the Gulf of Mexico. Begin at the southerly part of the 
latter division, occupying the temperate zone entirely, and you per- 
ceive a chain of mountains on the right hand, which proceeds 
northwardly along the Atlantic and but a short way from it ; and 
another chain of mountains, which in a similar manner pursues 
the shores of the Pacific ; thus dividing the space from ocean 
to ocean into three grand divisions ; one, a narrow slope, a sort 
of extended sea shore, between the Atlantic and the Alleghanies ; 
another narrow slope between the Rocky Mountains and the Pa- 
cific; and a spacious region, greatly larger than both the others 
united, bounded east and west by the two chains of mountains. 
Upon the narrowest of those ocean-slopes, the least fertile, that 
which has the more unfriendly climate, and in general the fewest 
natural resources, are the thirteen old United States situated, with 
the bulk of the present population of the Union, cultivating those 
arts of life to which the domestic consumption of the country, but 
above all the ready access to Europe, invites us. Adjoining the 
Pacific, the broader of the two slopes, the more productive, the 
milder in climate, that which by its ready access to the enormous 
multitudes of Asiatic population has the greater commercial resour- 
ces, is, by reason of gross and monstrous neglect of successive ad- 
ministrations of the Federal Government, not even tenanted in its 
vast extent by so much as a single American post where the stripes 
and stars may give sign of our presence and attest our right of 
possession, until our supineness has raised up an adverse claimant 
on the part of Great Britain, who is ready enough at all times to 
lay her grasping hand upon every spot on the face of the globe 
which by fraud or force she can wrest from its true proprietors. 
Of the intermediate space, forming a single valley of vast extent, 
with the Mississippi, or rather the Missouri flowing in its bottorHj 



2-3 

having fifty seven large tributary rivers, some of them traversing 
from one to two thousand miles before they reach the main trunk, 
— the very field of all others for the wonders of the steam engine 
to operate in, o\ercoming space, and removing all objections aris- 
ing from the direction of currents or the remoteness of parts, — of 
this valley it has been said by the most intelligent of all foreign 
observers, that "it is, upon the whole, the most magnificent dwel- 
ling-place prepared by God for the abode of man ;" and it was 
said with precision and truth ; for there is upon earth no other re- 
gion combining in the same degree the qualities of magnitude, uni- 
ty, salubriousness of climate, fertility of soil, mineral resources, 
and facility of interior intercourse. Such are the remarkable ge- 
ographical features of the United States ; the basin of the Mis- 
sissippi being the main body, and the mountain slopes on the At- 
lantic and the Pacific being the flanks, whose maritime position 
protects the whole from foreign assault, and at the same time as- 
sociates the whole with Europe on the one hand, and Asia on the 
other ; constituting the congenial parts of a most extensive, but at 
the same time, most compact, natural territory for the reception of 
a great confederation of States. 

We have inspected the country ; let us now inspect the people 
to whom it belongs. That people consists chiefly of diflTerent 
branches of the Teutonic race, as Dutch, German, Swedish, Sax- 
on and Norman, the combination of the latter predominating over 
all others. Individually, they possess the hardihood, resolution, 
perseverance, industry, enterprise, activity, love of liberty, steady 
energy, and deep enthusiasm of character, which in various pro- 
portions appertain to those primitive stocks. Their local institu- 
tions are thoroughly democratic ; and thus aid in the develop- 
ment of that individualization of power and of effort, which is the 
great secret of personal liberty. In a word, they are the very 
men, best fitted by their personal character and political institu- 
tions to penetrate the primeval forest, to reclaim the wilderness, to 
cover the waste with smiling fields, to found cities, to navigate the 
rivers and the seas, to flinch before none of the obstacles which 
nature and fortune throw in their way, and by their steadily rapid 
progression to give to the New World the blessings of civilization 
and Christianity. This is their vocation ; this their destiny. And 
the time is near at hand, — near in the life of a nation, — not unat- 
tainable in the life of a man, — when the United States will possess 
more than a hundred million inhabitants, nearly all speaking the 
same language, — having one general civilization, literature, and na- 
tional character, — similar laws and religion. Thus much I hold to 
be certain. It is not conjecture. It is not prediction. It is infe- 
rence simply, from known facts and sure premises, like that, by 
which we judge that the same bright sun, which rose in the east 
to-day, will continue to-morrow to run his glorious career on high. 
And this the certain fact, of such an identical population, so large, 



23 

and of such character, placed in such natural advantages, will be 
an event unparalleled in the history of human race, and big with 
consequences which baffle conjecture, and defy calculation. 

But some one stands ready to object. — There may be foreign 
wars, there may be Indian wars, there may be mal-administration 
of the public affairs, there may be civil wars, there may come a 
dissolution of the Union. True, all these things are possible, 
some of them probable, nay, certain to happen. — How then, it 
will be demanded, can I speak with so much confidence of the an- 
ticipated future greatness of the United States? I reply, that 
none of these things are adequate to prevent the predestined re- 
sult. — There will be as there have been, men of influence in pub- 
lic affairs, rash, passionate, unfit for civil rule, who may sacrifice 
the welfare of years, to the passion of an hour; there will be 
others, who look only to the ascendancy of a party, regardless of 
the good of the country ; others, who sell themselves to some 
overbearing sectional interest or predominant faction, and main- 
tain by suppleness that hold of political life which they could never 
secure by the lofty qualities of a true statesman. But we have 
seen experiments enough of the operation of this fact to show, 
that the people of the United States possess recuperative energies, 
in their elastic habits of mind and character, in the freedom of 
their institutions, in the vast resources of the country, and in the 
separate rights and domestic policy of each State, to rise supe- 
roir to all the blunders or misdeeds of the Federal Government. — 
Foreign wars, even the most desperate and protracted, can never 
bear so heavily on the wliole Union at once, as to affect perma- 
nently its general growth. If invaded by a foreign enemy, that 
invasion acts directly on the frontiers of the country ; the great 
interior, retains all the substance of peace, and the means of keep- 
ing up the supply of men, arms, and provisions for the parts at- 
tacked ; if one portion of the country suffers, the rest is exempt, 
or may even derive enhanced prosperity from the events and 
consequences of the war. There are but two great nations which 
touch us by land ; and each of them has more to fear from us than 
we from them. — Indian wars have been and always will be com- 
paratively confined to some one region, and however disastrous 
there, yet incapable of acting on the nation at large. — Civil war, 
either with or without a disruption of the Union, would be a more 
heavy calamity ; but in that event our situation would at worst be 
analogous to that of Europe, most of the various nations of which 
are coll(;cted together in a less space than the surface of the 
United States ; and all the protracted wars of Europe, even the 
sanguinary struggle of the French Revolution, even the general 
invasion and ravage of the whole Roman Empire by the northern 
Barbarians, though they retarded, and sometimes threw back, the 
advancement of population and civilization in Europe, yet did not 
wholly prevent it ; and the identity of our language, the ties of 
blood and commercial association, the nature of our institutions. 



24 

and the diversity of our resources, aflord us many guaranties Against 
the occurrence of any internal wars so general and so destructive 
as those which have afflicted the different states of Europe. 

For the people of the United States, it is a most auspicious cir- 
cumstance, that our progression is not accomplished by force of 
arms. Our advancement is a peaceful one, the inevitable result of 
natural circumstances. For I do not regard occasional contests 
with the Indians as contradictory of this position. Their gradual 
extinction, like our gradual expansion, is chiefly to be ascribed to the 
personal qualities of each race ; to our industry, enterprise, civili- 
zation, and social institutions, on the one hand, and to their want 
of these, and their untameable savagery, on the other hand, which 
dooms them to self-destruction. Our progression, therefore, is 
on the whole an eminently peaceful one. There are two Euro- 
pean nations, and only two, which like us, have within the same 
half century greatly advanced in power ; and their condition il- 
lustrates by contrast our own. Since the close of the War of In- 
dependence, Great Britain has added more than fifty, perhaps 
seventy millions of subjects to her dominion. But they are for- 
eign nations, alien to her in religion, laws, language, and feeling, 
— reduced into servitude by wanton invasion, — situated at the other 
extremity of the globe, — scattered over Asia, Africa, and the 
South Sea islands, — attached to her by no ties of affection or in- 
terest, — prompt at the first inviting occasion to rise in arms against 
a hateful oppressor, — overgrown and unwieldy masses of remote 
possessions, held to her only by a thread as it were, which must 
and will snap off, the moment that her maritime ascendancy 
is shaken, or that civil convulsions call for her forces at home, or 
that Russia gets ready to strike the long meditated blow. Dur- 
ing the same period, Russia has been the only other permanently 
progressive European Power. Her advancement has been analo- 
gous to that of the United States in this, that it has proceeded 
by gradual and sure acquisitions in regions of country adjoining 
to the original source of empire ; but they have been acquisitions 
by conquest ; the military operations of a great military state like 
Rome, while England is the parallel of ancient Carthage. While 
the empire of Russia is a more stable one, therefore, than that of 
England, and more likely to endure, it needs no exhibition of de- 
tails to demonstrate the superior advantages and better future 
chances of the people of the United States. 

I do not say the United iStates, but the people of the United 
States, because the Anglo-American people is certain to over- 
spread this Continent, though in the progress of that great work 
new combinations of government may be destined to take the 
place of the present Federal Union, But I consider this the less 
probable alternative. It seems to have been the fate of highly 
civilized states to have a set career before them to run, and then 
to yield the ascendancy to others. Thus, the people of Greece, 
from the time of the Trojan war to the coming of Alexander, pro- 



25 

ceeded to develope the utmost capacities of an imperfect con- 
federacy of small repnblies ; and that point attained, they fell. 
Rome had the destiny to do the utmost that could be done by the 
instrumentality of municipal institutions in the field of politics and 
war ; and that task accomplished, she also fell. I consider it the 
destiny of the United States to people, cultivate, and civilize this 
Continent ; and I anticipate no end of her power until the ap- 
pointed work be done. 

It is a great error, it- seems to me, into which many persons fall, 
both at home and abroad, to attach the idea of instability to the 
institutions of the United States. The English have counted up- 
on this from time to time, in their controversies with us ; once 
they sought by intrigue to bring about a separation of the States ; 
and at the present time there are those among the old Tory refugees 
in the British Provinces who confidently look for it. They may, 
I think, dismiss all such hopes. The stability of the United Stales 
is proved by results, and it may be proved by principles. There is on 
other government in Christendom, which through the same period 
has enjoyed the same domestic tranquillity as the United States, — 
the same exemption from wars, — the same easy working of public 
administration, — the same absence of insurrection, riot, or other 
forcible opposition to the laws, — the same continuity of general 
organization. The individuals and the presses among us, who in- 
fer the contrary from occasional disorders which occur in the coun- 
try, are political Sybarites pained by the rumpling of a rose-leaf; 
they fail to remember that imperfection belongs to every thing hu- 
man ; that all evils are comparative ; and that the disorders, public 
or private, among us, are as nothing compared with what is daily 
happening in France, England, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, and 
every where else in Europe, — countries, which have insurrections, 
revolutions, civil wars and national convulsions on a great scale, 
where we have but petty riots, individual acts of violence, or wor- 
dy dissensions in print or debate upon mere questions of expedi- 
ency or of personality. 

Such are the results. And these are answerable to the theory. 
It is of the nature of the institutions of the United States to re- 
concile the greatest mobility and adaptation to change in the relations 
of individuals and in ordinary legislation, with the greatest fvxed- 
ness in the general principle. The Federal Government has a lim- 
ited and specific sphere of action in our foreign and inter-state re- 
lations, and in those few things which are necessary to give unity 
and harmony to the great whole. To secure these objects, the 
Constitution provides for the direct representation of the individ- 
ual citizens themselves in the lower House of Congress ; and it 
acts directly upon the individual citizen in those things which are 
within the resort of the Federal power ; which the old Confedera- 
tion could not do ; and which deficiency was one of the radical 
faults of that scheme of government. To the several States, on 
the other hand, are reserved the great mass of administrative pow- 
4 



26 

er ; to secure which they choose the President by electoral col- 
leges of States, and they are equally represented as States in the 
Senate. Hence, good ambition is diffused, and has a multitude of 
objects to work upon beneficially, and ample scope, not only in 
the political a^lairs of the Union, but if shut out or disappointed 
there, then still enough in those of the separate States. Hence, 
also, bad ambition is diffused, and is rendered harmless by diffu- 
sion, like a drop of poison in water ; for it never happens, that 
any ill disposed individual is able to combine a considerable num- 
ber of States in projects injurious to the Union, because the dis- 
affection or passion of one section or group of States is neutraliz- 
ed by the loyalty or calmness of the rest, — in consequence of their 
exemption from the local causes or individual influences which 
produce the supposed disaffection or passion. And therefore the 
gradual enlargement of the Union strengthens rather than weak- 
ens it ; because it continually tends to increase the odds against 
the efficiency of any local or sectional cause of disloyalty or dis- 
turbance. Which admirable effect of the enlargement of the Un- 
ion is the more to be prized, because it is in harmony with other 
features of our institutions ; since the Federal system imparts to 
the United States the capacity of exterior strength, and thus ena- 
bles them to aspire to greatness, without prejudice to the demo- 
cratic principle, which informs and animates the local institutions 
of the several States. 

To that general similarity of opinion and of manners among us 
which tends more than any thing else to make of a great nation 
one people, — to that identity of political institutions which binds 
us together by ties that are the more surely stringent for be- 
ing almost insensible, — to the one great democratic doctrine, 
which is the very spirit and essence of those institutions, — to the 
general harmony created by the facilities of commercial intercourse, 
the sense of common interest, the intermixture of personal rela- 
tions, and the natural dependence of the different sections of the 
Union one upon another, — to that universal respect for the Con- 
stitution, which the conviction of its theoretical excellence, and 
the perception of its benefits and advantages, engender, — to the 
physical and moral strength, which the geographical peculiarities 
of the country, and the character of its people, impart, — to all 
these, there is a great and melancholy exception, in the existence 
of slavery and the condition of the black race in the States of the 
South. Would to God that this cup, — drugged with bitterness to 
the very brim, — might pass from us. Not only is the existence of 
slavery a grievous and almost immedicable evil in itself, not only 
does it involve a future which cannot be contemplated without 
anxiety, but moreover, great as is the immediate wealth derived 
from it, it is the most obvious drawback on the material strength of 
the Union. For the people of the South, resolved at all risks to 
maintain negro slavery, or unable perhaps to see their way clearly 
to any other alternative, exert themselves incessantly to secure to 



27 

the slave interest the control of the Federal Government for its 
protection, and continually recur to empirical changes in the na- 
tional policy in the vain hope thus to bring up their local condition 
to the level of that of the North, not seeing as they ought that our 
superior prosperity under all the changes they introduce is the ef- 
fect of immovable natural laws, which delight to reward the la- 
bor of the free. And the people of the North are thus aggrieved 
by the measures which the interests of slavery call for, or seem to call 
for, at the same time that our settled convictions of right and wrong 
lead us to condemn slavery as a great moral and political evil, and 
to desire its cessation, though our fealty to the Constitution with- 
holds us from attempting any direct interference with it. Owing 
to which considerations, slavery is the most serious and threaten- 
ing of all the causes of dissension among the members of the 
Union. And it is also the weak point of the country on the side 
of its foreign relations, especially since the abolition of negro-sla- 
very in the British West Indies. That it is likely, however, in 
any present aspect of the question, to hasten the dissolution of the 
Union, I do not believe ; because I know that the North most 
anxiously deprecates such an event, and is more unanimous and 
fixed upon this point than concerning any thing else whatever ; 
and I think that the South, also, the more it reflects on the subject, 
the more it will be convinced that the disruption of the Union by 
them, would be, to thein and their peculiar interests, the mere mad- 
ness of an act of deliberate suicide, which neither the whole, nor a 
majority, of the slave-holding States could be persuaded to commit. 
Slavery consigns the Southern States to perpetual weakness, 
foreign and domestic, and to perpetual discontent ; whilst liberty 
fills the North with men and with riches. The weight of physi- 
cal strength in the United States is ever tending towards the 
North, and especially the North West. It is there that new com- 
munities grow up with such prodigious celerity, by emigration from 
the Eastern States and from Europe. In the first Congress, as 
among the original thirteen States, and as between those which 
have now abolished slavery and those which have not, the votes 
were, I believe, by the census of 1790, 35 to 32 ; as between the 
same States (deducting Maine) the votes are by the census of 1830, 
99 to 61 ; as between all the seventeen old States, adding Maine 
and Vermont on the one side, and Kentucky and Tennessee on the 
other, the votes are changed to the ratio of 112 to 87, from that 
of 37 to 32 ; while in the new States of the North West and 
South West, the proportion, by the census of 1830, — as between 
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, on this side, and Louisia- 
na, Arkansas, Missouri, Alabama and Mississippi, on the other, — 
was as 30 to 13 ; and the disproportion will be still greater in 
1840, without reckoning the slow increase of Florida as contrast- 
ed with the rapid growth of Wisconsin. Such are the fruits of 
liberty on the one hand, and of slavery on the other ; of the ob- 
servance or the violation of the everlasting laws of Nature. 



^8 

In addition to the existence of negro slavery in the SoUtherii 
States, there is one other great fact, which mars the political unity 
of North America. This Continent was originally settled, and for 
a long time oecupied, by Colonies dependent on Europe. The 
independence of the United States was the beginning of a new 
order of things ; and as political doctrine is progressive, and the 
true democratic principle of self-government is contagious to all 
around, so soon as the favorable moment arrived, Mexico, in com- 
mon with the rest of Spanish America, raised the standard of in- 
dependence, and followed our example of separation from Europe. 
Though placed within or near to the tropics, so far as regards the 
seat of her power and the bulk of her population, yet the 
domain of the Mexican Republic extends north nearly ten 
degrees in the rear of the Western States. Into that space, the 
population of the United States has already begun to eXjOand 
itself, and will continue to expand in the inevitable progress of 
events. It avails nothing to deplore this as an operation injurious 
to Mexico ; the thing happens : it is an existing fact to which we 
cannot shut our eyes ; and whether in the form of a separate 
government as in the present case of Texas, or otherwise, it is 
evident to demonstration that so much of that region as lies with- 
in the temperate zone, — destitute now of inhabitants, unoccupied 
and unvalued by its nominal owners, rich vacant lands alluring 
onward the footsteps of the daring and hardy pioneer, — will by al- 
most imperceptible degrees become the possession and the abode 
of Anglo Americans. Nor, if they did not carry with thern the 
institution of domestic slavery, need their progress in that direc- 
tion be the subject of serious regret ; but the contrary. We at 
least have nothing to apprehend in that quarter. 

But on the northern and eastern frontiers of the United 
States, overhanging us from sea to sea like a lowering storm-cloud, 
are the British Provinces, still €le[)endent on Europe. That, is 
the point of peril. There, is monarciiy in its worst fc?rm, that of 
the forcible occupation, by a foreign prince, of a country whose 
natural position, and social constitution, and contiguity to us, im- 
pel it towards independence and freedom and self-government. 
There, is the fruitful source of perpetual border difticulties ; for 
that long inland frontier, of river, and plain, and lake, is utterly 
incapable of being guarded by fortifications or armies against the 
hazards of war, or withheld from illicit commercial intercourse 
either in peace or war. Suppose New England and New York 
to be separate nations : Could any conceivable number of garri- 
sons or custom houses build up an impassable barrier between 
them ? Impossible. And yet such is the relative situation of the 
United States and the British Provinces. And there, is the per- 
nicious fact, which forces us into the field of European politics, 
and gives to a European Power control over us. The war of 
1776 was waged from Canada. The war of 1812 was waged 
from Canada. The next, and the next, and the only foreign 



•29 

Wars, which we have any cause to dread, will, if the present statd 
of things lasts, be waged from Canada. For while the rest of 
Europe, if it would assail us at all, must assail us by sea, and can 
only strike at our ocean frontier, and will be impotent against us 
there by reason of the extent of our coast which excludes the 
idea of blockade, and the difficulty of transporting great armies 
over sea, and the impossibility of sustaining them without a fixed 
and sure foothold on shore, — while such is our relation to the rest 
of Europe, England, on the contrary, has her great naval depots and 
military arsenals on our eastern and northern land frontiers, and 
by the St. Lawrence and the Lakes has an open avenue into the 
heart of the United States. Hence, when we have been at war 
with her, the conflict has raged, not on the sea coast merely, but 
on the interior soil of New York, Ohio, and Michigan, a region 
which ought to be as inaccessible to European armies as if a wall 
of adamant rose around it on all sides. 

But this unnatural condition of things cannot and will not last. 
The British Colonies are approaching to that maturity of separate 
strength, which brings with it independence. When they have 
reached that maturity, they will as surely sunder from the Mother 
Country, as the ripe fruit drops from the tree. Li the case of 
them, as of other American Colonies, why should they cross the 
Atlantic for men to govern them ? Why not govern themselves ? 
Why should the flowers of their prosperity serve only to give hon- 
ey for foreign drones to live on ? Why should not the natural 
resources of their country be developed for the benefit of its own 
people ? They must and they wmII be. There is no dominant and 
all-pervading aristocracy in those provinces to assimilate their 
condition to that of Britain ; the natural tendency of their so- 
cial condition is towards democracy, and assimilation with us ; 
and that tendency is enforced and forwarded by the inevitable in- 
fluence of our proximity to them. They have been misgovern- 
ed, grossly, wickedly misgoverned. There is no doubt of this. 
It is proclaimed by themselves ; it is declared in the British Par- 
liament ; it is admitted by each successive Colonial Secretary ; it 
is spoken out in language not to be mistaken, the language of in- 
surrection and civil war. It is monstrous for Americans to deny 
that the Canadas have been misgoverned ; it is idle for any body 
to deny it. I engage to exhibit a parallel of every one of the 
specifications of tyranny set forth in our Declaration of Independ- 
ence, by the same or greater acts of tyranny perpetrated by 
Great Britain in the Canadas. Not that England is a worse mis- 
tress to them than any other foreign Power would be. Far from 
it. England, with all her faults, and I take pleasure in making 
the admission, England is a wiser, a milder, a purer, a better, 
ruler of her American Colonies, than any other of the Great 
Powers of Europe has been. But colony and liberty are ideas 
incompatible. They can no more exist together than water and 
fire. The Canadas have greater, far greater, causes of complaint. 



30 

than we had, when we belonged to Great Britain. Our colonial 
councils were elective, theirs are appointed by the Crown ; and 
that is one of the points at issue in their present troubles. We 
had town governments ; they are forbidden to have them, be- 
cause England considers, and justly, that town governments are 
so many nurseries of freedom. We had roads, they have next to 
none ; we had public schools, they have absolutely none ; we 
had but few foreign troops quartered upon us, they have great ar- 
mies ; we were permitted to bear arms, they are not ; we, in short, 
possessed all the means and instruments of progression and 
freedom, which have been carefully withheld from them, through 
fear, if they possessed these means and instruments, that they 
also, after our example, would aspire to independence. At the 
present time, they are consigned to the tender mercies of military 
despotism, martial law, and occupation of the country by armed 
hosts of imported mercenaries ; their trusted public men cut off 
by the judicial murder of courts martial, or driven into exile; 
their villages given up to sack and conflagration ; their young 
men, some sabred in the field without quarter, others murdered in 
cold blood, and without trial, after battle is over ; their women 
violated ; the bodies of their slain patriots left to rot on the ground 
unburied, or turned over to beasts to devour ! God of justice, 
where sleeps thy thunder ? Is there no vengeance for those who 
do those deeds of ignominy and horror ? Is it to be endured, does it 
not make the blood boil, that Europeans, — hireling soldiers of for- 
tune, aliens to the land and its people, the base and sordid tools 
of transatlantic lust of power, should pollute the rich soil of 
America with such enormities ? We shudder at the recital of these 
very acts of horror, when perpetrated by Turks in Greece, or by 
Russians in Poland. Shall they happen at our door-stone, and 
awaken no condemnation ? They shall not, they will not, until 
the Declaration of Independence be expunged from our memo- 
ries, and every sentiment of patriotism and freedom, which hal- 
lowed the Revolution, be extinguished in our hearts. 

When the time comes, as come it surely will, for those Provin- 
ces to be independent, then will there be more complete unity of 
political principle on this Continent. It will come ere long ; for 
not England herself, or if England, not the Provinces, can submit 
to the military occupation of the Canadas as a permanent system 
of government. Or will the Mother Country reduce the Colo- 
nies to a desert and call that peace ? No, they will become 
free, and their freedom will be for the common benefit of 
America. Independent, in close association with us, enjoying to- 
gether with us the navigation of the St. Lawrence and the Lakes, 
the Atlantic fisheries, and the fur trade of the North West, each of 
us delivered from border controversies and both possessed of simi- 
lar political institutions. North America would then present one har- 
monious American whole, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic 
Sea. 



31 

Fellow citizens, the ideas, which I have thus presented to you, 
may be thought peculiar, they may seem to be startling, but they 
are no Utopian speculations. They are plain matters of fact. 
North America will be independent, it will be republican, it will be 
Anglo-American. This result will be reached by the (for the 
most part) peaceful progress of peaceful events. And its general 
effect will be a peaceful one. — What is the prolific cause of so 
great and frequent wars in Europe ? Evidently, the subdivision of 
that Continent into many distinct nations, speaking different lan- 
guages, having dissimilar ideas and institutions, and adverse 
interests, that war only can adjust. What is the remedy pro- 
posed by the friends of peace, for this unhappy state of things? 
The tables of the last Congress were covered with memorials, 
praying that the United States would institute measures for a great 
league of all the states of Christendom, to be represented in a per- 
manently organized Congress of Nations, which should regulate 
their common interests, and adjudicate upon their respective dis- 
putes, so as to settle these by peaceful counsel instead of by force. 
The same thing has been long ago proposed in Europe by friends of 
peace there. But those national diversities of theirs, which I just 
indicated, have stood in the way of the adoption of any such per- 
manent system in Europe. And the United States could not unite 
with them, or any of them, in such a system, without embarking 
our peace and welfare in the same bottom with theirs, entering 
into entangling alliances with them, and in fact surrendering our 
own national sovereignty to a new sovereignty governed by the 
proposed Congress of Nations. But, on this Continent, the 
scheme is feasible and congenial to the natural condition of things. 
If the British Provinces were independent, and associated 
with us, the object would be at once attainable so far as regards 
the future of North America, inhabited for the chief part by one 
race, speaking mostly one language, having identical institutions, 
and imbued with the same opinit»ns and ideas, with its millions of 
people, not split up into hostile nations, but peacefully combined 
together for the promotion of their common good. What a noble 
anticipation ! What a glorious prospect ! Is this a mere vision of the 
fancy ? I will not believe it. If it be, I would rather continue to 
dream this dream, than to awaken to the poor reality of political 
strife on transient or trivial objects, and the vain toil of public effort 
unblessed by great or elevated aims. For I believe, with one of the 
most brilliant of modern writers, that " Legislators can create no 
rewards and invent no penalties equal to those which are silently 
engendered by society itself, while it maintains, elaborated into a 
system, the desire of glory and the dread of shame ;" and I desire, 
therefore, to see my countrymen lift their minds to the level of 
their country's destiny, and to have them feel that their own fame 
is identified with her's. 

Fellow citizens, I have addressed you thus far, as the people of 
the United States ; but I have in conclusion a very few words to 



32 

say to yon as the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 
This Commonwealth is, in my opinion, not only better instructed, 
— more devoted to knowledge, good morals, and religion, — but 
favored also with a more general diffusion of competency and 
comparative wealth, than most, if not than any, of her sister States 
of the Union. At the same time, it must happen, as the public 
lands become settled, as the limits of the Union spread, as 

Westward the course of empire takes its way, 

that our nominal power is diminished, relatively to the whole 
Union. Our territory is limited. We have few peculiar natural 
advantages. But the Union is that wide field, in which we have 
the preference over foreigners, for our coasting vessels, our 
freighting ships, our fish, oil, manufactures, and money capital. 
Our prosperity is the fruit of the intelligence, cultivation, indus- 
try, enterprise, frugality, and skill of our people, exerted by sea 
and land. And that prosperity is fostered of course, and in part 
maintained, by the progression of the Union. Hence, I have 
been accustomed to consider the settlement of the public lands, 
and the wider market thus opened to the productions of our in- 
dustry, to be of more pecuniary importance to Massachusetts than 
the hoarding of those lands for the contingent and uncertain 
benefit of revenue or distribution. Besides that emigration 
to the West is the great safety-valve of our population, and 
frees us from all the dangers of the poverty, and discon- 
tent, and consequent disorders, which always spring up in a 
community when the number of its inhabitants has outrun its ca- 
pacity to afl'ord due recompense to honest industry and ambition. 
And this Commonwealth has the means ever, to retain a just 
share of influence in the public councils. Let her, — under the 
guaranty and guardianship of the great constitutional principle of 
State Rights which are the especial security of the States that 
are at the same time rich and small, — so protected, let her continue 
to tread firmly the path of intellectual, moral, and industrial culti- 
vation and superiority, — let her make wise selections of her pub- 
lic men and extend to them a generous confidence, — let her keep 
clear of the besetting folly of mankind to sacrifice objects which 
are large and lasting for the sake of those which are small and 
transient, — in a word, let her persevere in the policy it has been 
her pride to follow hitherto, of dedicating herself to the insepara- 
ble interests of public and private virtue, — and she will never 
cease to be loved devotedly by her children, and respected and 
honored by all others, betide what may to the general fortunes of 
herself or of the United States. 






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